Last week, graduate drawing/painting candidate Kathryn Miller was a part of a gallery talk at Waiting Room here in Minneapolis. The gallery discussion was in conjunction with the show, Current Location, and featured artists Isa Newby Gagarin, Jessica Henderson, and Miller. The discussion welcomed cross-conversation from attendees regarding the artists work, exhibition themes, and artistic positioning systems.

Co-curated by Mary L. Coyne and Jehra Patrick, Current Location is a meditation on representing and understanding cosmological and geographical space. The six artists included in Current Location practice within the ontological gap between representation and viewer, and draw on digitally and historically archived materials to render sensible the distinctly contemporary experience of existence-beyond-place.

Featured works offer cues like the compass arrow of Google earth, spectrographs of starlight, simultaneous iPhone videos shot from across continents, maps and images found in institutional archives, and mail art that physically circumnavigates the globe through economical trade-driven shipping routes. These are gestures toward systems constructed over an expanding history of technological development: the ever-shifting modes of representation on which we rely to comprehend, calculate and delineate the real and imagined vagaries of proximity and distance. The artists in the exhibition each explore how we identify our sense of place via the effects of cartographic languages and archived histories. Together these artworks make visible the apathetic existentialism of our daily validation of ‘current location.’